Loving Day

A Novel

"Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: his marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comic shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish-American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: in the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter and she thinks she's white. Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he never knew and a haunted house and history he knows too well. In their search for a new life they struggle with an unwanted house and its ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and inspire a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday that celebrates interracial love"--Publisher.

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This book started off good. It was very interesting to read the perspective and thoughts of a biracial person in American. However, it got very weird in the middle and spiraled from there...until the end, which left me wondering "what did I just read".

In Loving Day, the satirical/socio-political ideas never gets crowded out or soggy. Johnson is funny and his humor is imaginative but also biting and shrewd. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that he channels Mark Twain in the kind of keen observations about human foibles that he makes. Very few contemporary writers can make the kind of personal disasters or tragedies that his characters go through with such humanity and feeling. And no one, I daresay, writes about race with such simultaneous depth and lightness.